I’ve been buying these, throwing Fedora IoT, docker, and Tailscale on them and running them from different locations for personal projects.
* A Pi will sit much lower in total power consumption than almost any used PCs if both are doing effectively nothing (ie - simple, spiky tasks like filtering DNS, serving static content from RAM, etc.). You need to be doing something with the system before a PC server comes out ahead, and most people using a Pi as a home server... aren't.
Compared to a modern low-power x86 PC system, the difference isn't meaningful, but if you're buying used stuff 3 generations back, the difference becomes somewhat meaningful in terms of electric cost (on the order of tens of dollars per year, which is significant for hardware which cost tens of dollars to start with).
* The Pi of course has GPIO, SPI, etc. exposed, so you can use it as a nice "hybrid-IoT" device where it's a home server _and_ a sensor aggregator, for example. And the hat ecosystem, while generally insanely overpriced, is convenient.
Now, the moment you're running K8s/Docker or a real compute workload (security camera image recognition, etc.) you should probably move off of the Pi and onto something nicer, indeed. I absolutely never understood people running clusters of Pis or those goofy multi-Pi carrier boards. Just buy a real PC.
For electricity consumption, beyond the wallet, it actually seems that hardware should have a lifespan on the order of decades before electricity consumption savings offset the environmental impact:
"For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential (i.e. the amount of CO₂-equivalent emissions caused). For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years to limit their Global Warming Potential." —https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
Rather than buying a new Pi, repurposing a 5-year-old laptop has advantages if this something one cares about. Desktops are quite a bit more hungry (I've heard this got better in recent years), but I can attest that a 2012 laptop still functions very well as a server, easily better than a 2024-era Pi. Probably I'll replace it in the next 2-4 years (so at ~15yo) when my current laptop finally will have given me enough grief (my inner grandpa complains they don't make 'em like they used to), and I'm not saying others must optimise for climate alone either, but it's something to consider when deciding on a good balance
At some point, dealing with reselling vs. just throwing in a bin (either back-of-the-closet storage or garbage) just doesn't make sense from a time/money perspective.
A bunch of Pis allow you to run multi-node clusters on the cheap. If you're just experimenting with Kubernetes/Nomad/whatever, you don't need a lot of resources, just multiple nodes. It's easier and depending on config potentially cheaper than getting a beefier mini PC, throwing lots of RAM, and running VMs.
That's not necessarily true since the Pis are particularly terrible at idle power consumption. E.g. the "power off" state consumption shown in the article is actually higher than the idle consumption of some low-power Atom/Celeron x86 chips. The Pi is just terrible at power management.
Pi 2 and 3 typically sit at 200 mAh and 230 mAh, Pi 4 is not far away. Zero 2W can go down to 96 mAh.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/raspberry-p...
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/disabling-cores-reduc...
I don't see any x86 system approaching those numbers.
milliAmps (mA): This is a measure of current flow. Think of it like the flow rate of water through a hose. It's the same kind of unit as something like liters-per-minute is: Where mA is a measure of electrical current flow through a wire (or a device or whatever), liters-per-minute is similarly a measure of the flow of water through a pipe (or consumed, or whatever).
milliAmp-hours (mAh): This measures how much current a something like a battery can supply over time. Imagine it as the total volume of water a hose can deliver if left on for an hour. If a battery is rated at 1000 mAh, it means it can provide a current of 1000 milliamps for one hour, or 500 milliamps for two hours, and so on. To use another water analogy, mAh is like describing the volume of water that is inside of a bucket.
The terms are not interchangeable.
If a Raspberry Pi draws 200 mA for one hour, I think it's reasonable to say it has drawn 200 mAh.
> Pi 2 and 3 typically sit at 200 mAh and 230 mAh
200mAh? Over the course of an hour? A day? A fortnight? Just one time, to kickstart the internal perpetual particle accelerator and continue infinitely without additional input? The phraseology used could have specified this information, but it did not do so.
One may wish these units would mean something other than what they do mean, but reality is simply not that way.
We aren't generally free to invent our own scientific nomenclature, or at least we aren't free to do so if effective and meaningful communication is a goal.
They are also saying that the RPi5 in the default power off state (which is not even a real power off) it stays at 2W.
This matches my own results from the RPi4, where I had difficulty getting it to idle at less than 3W at the wall. While my x86 result is _out of the box_ with an standard openSUSE install.
The (desktop) RPi devices are just TERRIBLE. Cheap, small, have multiple GPIOs, but terrible power-wise. The µc RPis are another story.
> 5W which is more in line with NUCs and everything else I've ever seen from a mini-PC.
Even on this very thread you have been quoted lower numbers. Just search around.
The efficiency isn't there, and you'll need to figure out a better cooling/case solution than the one Radxa ships, but I'm impressed by this little board.
If you can stretch your budget past $100 you can get a good brand new N100 or N305 system that will go further. Used gear is fine, but the power efficiency for anything in the $50-80 range used is pretty rough. Some people don't worry much about that, but in some parts of the world it can be $5+/month more to run older machines!
California being one of the worst offenders, ironically. In SoCal my family and I pay (across several households) between $0.50/kWh and $0.99/kWh, so even a 15W idle can cost us at least $5 a month.
The pad I got was about 1-1.25mm thick, not crumbly like yours was on video. I assume they figured out what the issue was with their supplier.
Still think the entire thermal design is whack, a single fan perpendicular to the board on the end could draw air through the heat sink as well as over the SSD on the top. Working on whipping up some 3D printable stuff once I get some time next week.
Don't get me wrong, though. Old stock computers are excellent for a wide variety of tasks, it's just that they definitely don't encroach on a lot of the use cases of modern SBCs. You needn't buy a Raspberry Pi 5 either; plenty of use cases like Home Assistant will run pretty well on a Pi 4 or even a Pi 3, and that's not getting into the many other reasons why a Pi may be interesting (like HATs, being able to use PoE power, GPIO, or even just the I/O in general.)
Right now I have Windows 10 on it as I needed to run some old proprietary software, but it's a proper gem of a machine. I got the one without touch screen.